Transplant Patients

A glass of grapefruit juice is not only a good, nutritious drink, it may have added benefits for organ transplant patients - some of which extend to their pocketbooks.University of Florida researchers report that grapefruit juice reduces the need for expensive drugs many transplant patients need to prevent their bodies from rejecting the transplanted organ.Most transplant patients take cyclosporine, a drug that prevents the rejection of such organs by suppressing the patient's immune system.

The 24 patients who have received lung transplants at Florida Hospital were assured in April that they would be able to get their follow-up care there, even though the hospital was closing its 2-year-old transplant program. Last week, however, they found out that would not be the case. The patients, most of whom need intensive weekly doctor visits, now must drive to Tampa, Gainesville or Jacksonville for that specialized care. "I'm devastated," said Kevin Przybyl, 34, who got a new pair of lungs at Florida Hospital last October and for the first time in his life was breathing easy.

An outbreak of tuberculosis among kidney transplant patients at Presbyterian University Hospital killed two people this week, hospital officials said Friday. Katherine Dittman, 65, a transplant patient, died Wednesday. She was diagnosed as having tuberculosis Dec. 26. A second patient, who died Monday, has not been identified. The spokeswoman said the two were among six patients at the hospital's kidney transplant center infected with the disease between October 1990 and January 1991. No new cases have been reported at the center since late January, officials said.

America has an organ-donation crisis. In 2011, a patient died every 58 minutes while waiting for an organ to arrive. In 2012, the rate accelerated to one every 48 minutes - that is 30 per day. At this pace, within five years, a patient will die every minute due to the United Network for Organ Sharing's and the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network's principal reliance on altruism: the concern for others by donating an organ. As of Thursday morning, there were 120,230 patients on the waiting list who need an organ and about 500,000 more on renal dialysis, most of whom could benefit from a new kidney.

Every patient who undergoes an organ transplant is likely to develop cancer within 30 years, doctors said Thursday, quoting medical data collated since 1963. After 20 years, 60 percent of transplant patients will develop some type of cancer, mostly skin cancer, said Prof. Peter Morris, an Australian researcher at Britain's Oxford University. After 30 years, 100 percent of the transplant recipients will have some kind of cancer, he said. Morris said the drugs used to suppress the body's immune system and prevent rejection of the newly transplanted organ were the culprits.

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that it has approved the first temporary artificial heart for use in patients at risk of dying within 30 days as they await a heart transplant. The CardioWest Total Artificial Heart, manufactured by SynCardia Systems of Tucson, Ariz., takes over for the patient's failing heart, restoring normal blood pressure and shoring up such vital organs as the kidney and liver.

Since Aileen Phernambucq, 74, retired in 1986, she has used volunteering as a way to get out and meet people. Her interests and skills are diverse, and she has lent a helping hand to many Lake County organizations.Phernambucq said her favorite volunteer activity is Angel Flight of Florida, where she began volunteering in July 1997.She works with Angel Flight's ``Red-Eye Program,'' an emergency transplant flight program that flies organs and transplant patients free of charge.``I feel it's something worthwhile that I'm doing, and it's so exciting being out there, it really is,'' she said.

Organ transplant doctors sought to avert ''needless panic'' Friday as the government tracked down donated tissues from a Virginia man with AIDS that may have infected as many as 59 recipients across the nation.Three people who received organs in 1985, after the 22-year-old donor was killed in a robbery, have died of AIDS. Eight tissue grafts from the man - bones, soft tissues and a pancreas - may cause problems because they were not properly treated to kill the AIDS virus before implantation, the Food and Drug Administration said.

Looking back over the past year, Robert Crosson is thankful for a lot.Crosson was treated in April for cancer with high doses of chemotherapy and then underwent a bone marrow transplant.The 48-year-old Ormond Beach resident spent three weeks in the hospital. His condition was fragile but improved each day. He looks back now and remembers feeling scared during that time in his life.That feeling has passed, and now he feels grateful that he had the opportunity to receive such a specialized treatment in Volusia County.

Wanted: $50,000 to save a life.Brook-Ann Young's plea, in the form of a pink yard-sale flier, is that simple.There's nothing simple, though, about the ordeal that lies ahead for her husband, Terry Young, 36.The former tree service worker needs a new kidney and pancreas.Without them, the severely diabetic Sanford man will continue to spend the rest of his shortened life span on disability benefits and dialysis machines, as he has for the past seven years.And his wife will continue to rake leaves and pull weeds for a living so she can instantly leave work without fear of losing her job to respond to each new medical crisis her husband encounters.

The surgical-style mask covering Oviedo coach Tom Hammontree's mouth and nose fogs his glasses as he breathes. "It's just something you have to put up with," Walter Dahn said. Dahn understands. Hammontree, a track and field and cross country coach at Oviedo, and Dahn are part of a select group of Central Floridians who have had heart transplants. Before their surgeries at Florida Hospital, home to the only heart-transplant program in the Sentinel coverage area, their lives were filled with a medicine cabinet of emotions and feelings - doubt, fear, hope, pain, exhaustion, wondering whether they would survive.

Ohio -- Doctors say the woman who received the nation's first face transplant two months ago has left the hospital in Cleveland. The patient's surgeon said she left Thursday night. She is able to eat solid food and breathe on her own for the first time since her disfiguring injury occurred several years ago. The woman's identity has not been revealed. A dead donor provided the facial skin and bone that was needed for her 22-hour surgery in early December. Officials at the Cleveland Clinic would not say where the patient went.

PAISLEY Tammy Jo Alford is going on the trip of her life. Alford, 35, is to be evaluated Oct. 13-17 at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. If all goes well, she will be put on the list to receive a double-lung and heart transplant. She said she is going through "every emotion in one -- excited, scared -- just everything you can imagine." To help out with the expense, Lake County Pirate Riders from Pirate's Pub in Paisley recently put together a mystery poker run. In addition, the community put on a yard sale and car wash.

Eighteen months after receiving a new nose, chin and lips, the world's first face-transplant recipient has recovered enough use of her facial muscles to close her lips and smile, doctors in France reported Wednesday. The patient, Isabelle Dinoire, who was 38 when the transplant was performed in November 2005, has overcome two tissue-rejection episodes and two cases of kidney failure -- a side effect of the powerful drugs she must take to prevent her immune system from rejecting the facial graft.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- A critically ill patient could become the seventh fatality of a plane crash that killed six members of an organ-transplant team en route to save his life. The patient, on the operating table when the plane went down in Lake Michigan on Monday, is waiting for another organ. Divers resumed their search Wednesday in water as much as 50 feet deep, bringing up debris for examination by National Transportation Safety Board investigators. The donor organ, packed in ice in a cooler, has not been found.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A man who lost his right hand in a work-related accident more than 30 years ago became the third successful hand-transplant recipient in the United States, doctors said Thursday. David F. Savage was doing well the day after the surgery at Jewish Hospital in Louisville. Doctors said the transplant for Savage, 54, presented unusual challenges because of the length of time between losing his hand in a machine press and the surgery. The blood vessels leading to Savage's hand had shrunk because they were not in use, said Dr. Warren Breidenbach, the lead surgeon.

A leading researcher of a drug that has saved organ transplant patients' lives said Wednesday that federally required tests of the drug, in which some patients would get a placebo, would be unethical. The drug, FK506, has prevented organ rejection in heart, kidney and lung transplant patients and has even reversed rejection of liver transplants. Dr. Thomas Starzl, chief of transplantation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said FK506 is so effective that withholding it from a patient in need would be wrong.

Survival rates for the world's organ transplant patients have dramatically improved in the past decade, scientists said last week. The patients' chances were increased by anti-rejection drugs and matched donor and recipient tissue, according to a 10-year worldwide study. Data on more than 100,000 patients at 300 centers worldwide, presented at a meeting of transplant experts in Heidelberg, Germany, indicated that more than 80 percent of liver, heart and lung transplant patients survived at least a year after their operations, and nearly 70 percent of recipients of kidney and pancreas grafts performed in 1989 and 1990 survived a year or more, compared to 50-to 70-percent survival rates for those operations before 1985.

KISSIMMEE -- When Matt and Lura Thursam decided the best option for their ailing daughter was a multiple-organ transplant, they worried the procedure could put little Maggie's life at risk. This week, their worst fears are coming true as the 8-year-old Kissimmee girl fights for her life at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, awaiting a bone-marrow transplant from her 7-year-old brother, Max. The medical procedure, scheduled for Monday, became necessary after organ-rejection drugs damaged the girl's bone marrow and, with it, her immune system.